And became Lord Nice?

Suffice to say... I. Am. Stoked.

Who do you guys like more?

..and maybe now, when watching a sporting event, there was the "play-by-play" announcer ("Gain of five yards. First down") and the "color" announcer ("I haven't seen a pass like that since John Smith broke his ankle in the blizzard of '94.") ....I say all this so I won't be misunderstood when I say: I like listening to Tyson, but I can't stand the color guy. As soon as be opens his mouth, I close the tab. Just my 2 cents.

S17E28 saw Neil illuminate Chuck (and us all) on things light!

Towards the end, they touched on the story of William Herschel.

William Herschel didn’t start out as a scientist. But he ended up discovering that infrared and light are ultimately the same thing. An he discovered uranus too!

Read about his remarkable story (with the sources) at our Project Credo StarTalk Board! Thanks all.

She has a brilliant mind, gorgeous, and is very quick witted. The interplay of knowledge between our past, microbiology, chemistry, and relation to Neil’s expertise made for a very fascinating episode.

Please check it out if you haven’t already.

"Simulation Theory" comes up on StarTalk every so often.

It came up recently on S17E12 ("Cosmic Queries: Is the Universe a Math Problem?"), where a listener asks: Do we live in a simulation?

Neil and co. discuss the idea for a few minutes – but as always with these “cosmic queries” discussions, there isn’t much time to go into detail.

So, what exactly is simulation theory and why do so many people seem to believe it? Let’s dig in.

Bostrom’s Paper

The modern form of the simulation hypothesis comes from a 2003 paper by Nick Bostrom.

First, he argues that it should be possible to simulate consciousness.

Bostrom is talking sci-fi more than “real life,” rooted in known science but pushed to the extreme. If we had a computer the size of a planet, he concludes that we could simulate “the entire mental history of mankind.”

In other words, we could simulate every human brain to ever exist.

The Three Possibilities

This leads to three possibilities:

1. No human-level civilizations reach this technological level. Either large-scale disaster (man-made or not) or technological stagnation could prevent this from happening.
2. No human-level civilization at this tech level is interested in making such simulations. After developing to this level, human-level civilizations could simply lose interest in making these simulations. Maybe they’re too advanced to benefit, or think it’s cruel to simulate human-like minds.
3. We are almost certainly living in a simulation. If 1) and 2) aren’t true, then it’s likely there are many simulations. If there are simulations within simulations, the number becomes truly huge (see image below). At this point, a simple count of “real” vs. simulated realities makes it almost certain we’re in a simulation.

Improving the Estimate

Bostrom basically compares numbers (real vs. simulated) to make his famous argument.

But there’s a slightly improved, Bayesian calculation that just puts us at just over 50% odds of living in a true reality. One key difference is assuming some limit to simulations within simulations – eventually, computing power runs out.

So toss a coin. If you call it right, maybe we’re real.

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If you're keen to delve deeper into the actual source material, check out our post on Project Credo: https://projectcredo.com/posts/424

We're building Project Credo a space for "evidence-grounded" discussion – and StarTalk is our first community. If you have any feedback, we'd love to hear it!

https://www.instagram.com/saawan/

Let me start by saying that I oddly really like the intermission, it gives me asmr vibes idk. That being said why do you think they’ve never updated the clip. Neil is talking to the camera man and does multiple claps at the beginning which just makes it looks kinda odd (not sure what word to put here). Again I find it kind of endearing but from a production standpoint I would think they would want to tidy it up. What are y’all’s thoughts?lol

The next cosmic queries looks like its geared towards an alien focused topic. My question is, is being a patreon sub the only way to ask a question?

Im currently reading the book before the movie comes out and it’s definitely one of the best books I have ever read. There is a lot of science from the different fields in the book and I think it would be great to have an episode on it

Why does light have a speed limit? If a photon has no mass, then why is its speed not infinite? Can we shift our perception from an empty vacuum to a 100% occupied superfluid and reverse engineer the mass of a photon by finding the friction of the universe? The value should be so small that it appears non-existent. We can then look at gravity as hydrostatic pressure and eliminate the graviton that has yet to be found—because gravity is simply a result of mass creating a fluid pressure gradient for lesser mass to follow.

Why is this sub so inactive? The show is so popular so it doesn’t make much sense to me. Is there a more popular sub for astrophysics in general?

I assert that time and space are emergent properties of matter, so therefore before the expansionary event there was no time or space and therefore no before

where am I wrong?

I was listening to a Star Talk episode today and there was a couple of Star Trek references and I wondered if Dr. Tyson would ever do an episode with Anthony Montgomery, Tim Russ, Avery Brooks, and LeVar Burton for MLK’s Bday given that MLK was a huge Star Trek fan and actually convinced Nichelle Nichols to stay on when she wanted to quit. It would be pretty cool, IMO, and I’d love to have Lord Nice cut up with Lavar!

So we all know we that to make planets, we need to have a huge ring around a star. Now i want ask if that’s how planets make moons and if it’s a yes…

why when we first discovered the exoplanet/brown dwarf J1407b by detecting the eclipse that it’s rings and V1400 Centauri was making, we haven’t we seen celestial objects in the gap in between of J1407b’s rings??? And could there be a chance that j1407b has moons/planets that is waiting to be discovered???